Only now it feels the size of a planetoid, and there's a giant alien soldier looking back at you through the glass cube. You then travel through a portal in the same room, and find yourself stood on that ball of rock. There's a wonderful moment early on where you come across a small ball of rock encased in a glass cube. I've heard of alien hand syndrome, but this is ridiculous.Īs well as messing with your understanding of up and down, Prey also plays effectively with scale. Many encounters involve shooting enemies stood on walls while you are dangling from the ceiling like a weaponised spider. Human Head use these mechanics to produce neat little puzzles and mind-bending combat scenarios. These include wall-walks that let the player stick to any surface and glowing blue buttons that, when shot, flip the gravity of entire rooms. The portals are just one of a multitude of space-manipulating concepts Prey experiments with. Considering how it works within the constraints of a linear shooter, it pulls this off remarkably well. Ultimately, Prey is not a game about playing with Portals, but playing with space in general. It's unfortunate that Prey's portals look so similar to Portal's portals, right down to the glowing orange and blue edges that surround them. But Prey's aim is to confront the player with a place that is unrecognisably alien, from what it looks like to how you move around it. In some ways it's a strange choice of setting for a linear FPS, as it's so massive that it's almost impossible to comprehend the scale of it. The bar scene concludes with a spot of fisticuffs between Tommy and a couple of drunken rednecks, when all of a sudden aliens arrive! The bar is dismantled by greenish particle beams to the tune of Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper", while Tommy, Jen and Anisi find themselves trapped inside the gargantuan sprawl of a Dyson Sphere. The point is to ground the player in a humdrum reality, to give you a distinctly human frame of reference to compare to what comes next. I don't think it's superfluous frippery either.
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You can interact with all manner of objects in the environment, from the taps and the hand-dryer in the bathroom, to the TV and jukebox in the bar. Given you spend no more than ten minutes here, there's a remarkable amount of detail packed in. What matters here though is not the squabble between Tommy and Jen, but the space of the bar itself. It's clumsily written and poorly acted - an issue that dogs the game throughout.
Stuck between them is Tommy's grandfather, Anisi, who spends the scene warbling portentously about great challenges lying ahead and the importance of Tommy embracing the traditions of his ancestors. Our protagonist, Tommy, wants to leave the Reservation, but his girlfriend, Jen, wants to stay. Prey kicks off in a tacky-looking dive bar somewhere on a Cherokee Reservation, and concerns itself initially with a petty human drama. Prey's depiction of native Americans is not exactly the most sensitive. Although the game itself has not aged brilliantly, the ideas contained with in it are fascinating. And you know what? Looking at it from the other side of a billion Call of Duty sequels, I feel very differently about it. Oh and it doors that look like bumholes, because video games.īut with Arkane's reboot of Prey hovering just beyond the horizon, I decided to go back to the original, to see if there was anything more to Human Head's game than the vague snippets I recall. And the main character was a Cherokee fella who hated being Cherokee so much he refuses to acknowledge his heritage even when his dead grandad gives him a ghost eagle and the secret to immortality. I remember that it had portals like Portal, only you couldn't do anything with them and so they were basically just doors. It's only been, what, six years? *sniff*.Īs for the game Human Head Studios produced, frankly, I've barely thought about it in the last decade. It's an idea that still excites me, not that I'm still mourning it cancellation. A conceptual head-on collision between Mirror's Edge and Blade Runner, Prey 2 was set in an open-world, neon-soaked alien megacity. There was supposed to be a sequel, and it looked fantastic. The original Prey took a decade to develop, going through numerous iterations and engines before stumbling onto shelves in 2006. In fact, up to this point Prey is probably better known for the games that never happened than the one which eventually did. There are stormtroopers with better hit rates than that. This 'franchise' (imagine airquotes the size of skyscrapers) has been in existence for two decades, resulting in one single game. What a curious legacy Prey has left behind.
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